“But the logos are identical.”
“They aren’t identical, Mark, one is navy and one is midnight blue.”
“Doesn’t matter. Look at the bullet points. GMC. ISHRS. WAW. It’s like they’re all ordering from the same menu. If I click through one more gallery of foreheads, I’m going to forget what a real human looks like.”
“Just pick the one with the best reviews.”
“They all have four-point-nine stars. Every single one. It’s a mathematical impossibility or a very expensive conspiracy.”
Ruth was right, of course, but so was Mark. They were sitting in the wreckage of a Tuesday night, a laptop screen casting a cold, sanitised glow over a kitchen table that still had a light dusting of coffee grounds in the corner from when I’d tried to fix my keyboard earlier that afternoon.
I’d spent three hours picking grit out of the mechanical switches with a pair of tweezers, a task that requires a level of obsessive focus that makes you realise how much the tiny, invisible details actually matter.
When you’re looking at a screen, those details vanish. You are presented with a “Genre.”
The Mask of the Script
In my world-I spend a lot of time looking at handwriting as a professional analyst-we talk about the “mask of the script.” When someone tries very hard to write legibly and professionally,